Daring Bakers - Swiss Swirl Icecream Cake

I am typing this at the airport while waiting for my flight home, having spent the weekend with my interstate-based family. A visit home is especially poignant at the moment, as both my mother and the family dog have in the last three months had operations to deal with the same dreaded disease. Mum is also enduring some ongoing treatment, which has knocked her about a fair bit in recent weeks, so it was lovely to see her and touch her in person. The dog is behaving as though nothing ever happened, despite the large gash on his back sewn up with stitches that make him look like a Tatty Teddy. He is lively and frisky, and doesn't seem at all bothered by his recent operation. His stitches come out tomorrow.


Because I had heavy commitments with the writing project I have mentioned previously, and I knew that I was having a weekend totally away from it all, I was ultra-organised with Daring Bakers this month, and got it done early on. However, it came at a price, Ugarte - I was so engrossed in the final assembly that I didn't notice that the washing machine drain pipe had managed to work its way out with vibration, and by the time I noticed, I had a stream flowing in my carpeted living room. Needless to say, this was not cheap to fix, and as it happened on a Saturday morning, I was lucky indeed to get hold of a carpet technician who was able to squeeze me in and sop up (or suck up!) the water. The offending hose pipe has now been taped into place with PVC tape, as this is an exercise that I do not want to repeat.

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

Sunita gave us some leeway with this challenge, in that provided we made each component (swiss roll, roll filling, two icecreams and an icecream sauce) from scratch, we did not have to use the recipes she provided.

I decided, in a rare departure, to make everything using my own recipes. I made a vanilla swiss roll from The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, a raspberry cream cheese filling, David Lebovitz's vanilla bean icecream and raspberry (in my case, mixed berry) icecream, and a mixed berry sauce inspired by Steve Manfredi.

Here is my vanilla swiss roll spread with the raspberry cream cheese filling:

Here is a far more flattering perspective after it has been rolled up, showing the pretty pink filling:

Margaret Fulton's recipe, which makes one swiss roll, is as follows:

1/2 cup self raising flour
pinch of salt
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon hot water
extra sugar for dredging

Preheat your oven to 220 degrees Celsius. Spray a 30cm x 25cm swiss roll pan with cooking oil, and line with baking paper.

Sprinkle a flattened out tea towel with sugar ready for turning out the baked cake.

Sift the flour and salt together. In a separate heat-proof bowl standing over a saucepan of gently simmering water, whisk the eggs and sugar together until thick and creamy.

Remove the bowl from the heat and continue to whisk the mixture until cool. Fold in the flour, then the hot water. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and spread out evenly.

Bake the swiss roll for 7-10 minutes, until pale golden and springy.

Turn the cake out immediately onto the sugared tea towel, peel off the paper lining (carefully - the cake is fragile!), and cut off the crisp edges of the cake with a knife. Roll the hot cake up in the sugared tea towel, from one short end towards the other, and allow the cake to cool in the tea towel.

Once the cake is cool, unroll it and spread it with the raspberry cream cheese filling. The filling is comprised of 65g cream cheese, 1/4 cup icing sugar, and 2 tablespoons raspberry jam, blended together until smooth.

Stage two in the assembly process is to line a mould with glad wrap and slices of swiss roll, then freeze it for at least an hour:

Here is my vanilla bean icecream being churned - the recipe is here (I only made half):

This is my favourite icecream ever - it is delicious!!! When this icecream is softened, it is spread in a layer over the cake before freezing again:

Next, I made a mixed berry sauce from this recipe, and mixed berry icecream using this David Lebovitz recipe:

Doesn't this sauce look great!

A layer of sauce is spread over the vanilla icecream layer, then the dessert is frozen for an hour or so before the rest of the cavity is filled with softened berry icecream:

I also closed off my bombe with more slices of swiss roll.

After freezing for around 4 hours, the completed bombe is turned out:

The next photograph clearly shows all layers - and how delicious this is:

Thanks to Sunita for hosting us this month. You can check out the original recipe at her site, and check out all the wonderful variations on the bombe at The Daring Bakers blogroll.